Liliana Blossom's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

The king's breath still hung in the air when Liliana heard a twig snap on the ridge above the path. She turned slowly. A figure stood between two trunks, half hidden, watching her from the slope. Not an animal. A person. Whoever they were, they had followed the story of her audience here and come to see it for themselves. The shadow at her back went quiet. The king would not speak again with a stranger's eyes on the dark. She stepped away from the shadow's edge so the king would not think she meant to keep talking. She walked up the slope. The watcher was a small woman in a green shawl, holding a smooth stone marbled in teal and mint. She flushed when Liliana came close. She said she had heard in the village that a pink ape was speaking to the king, and she had wanted to see if it was true. She held out the stone as if it explained her. She said she had meant to leave it as her own offering, once she saw how it was done. Liliana kept her voice low. She said the king required privacy, and that watching from the trees would end the audience for both of them. Liliana did not send the woman away with empty hands. She led her back down the path, past the wooden bear and the bell, past the fox and the rabbits still gathered around the sound. She pointed through the trees to a treehouse she had passed on her first trip in, its roof shingled with lotus petals and its walls patched with shells. She told the woman a girl lived there who gave good advice to people who wanted to bring something of their own to the forest. The woman looked at the teal stone in her palm and nodded. She said she was sorry. She climbed the wooden stairs toward the treehouse door without looking back. Liliana returned alone to the shadow's edge. She did not speak yet. She set down what she had made in the shed while she waited for her nerve: a smooth grey stone she had shaped into a heart, wrapped in ivy she had gathered from the path, with a two-toned lotus pressed into its center. She placed it at the line where the light ended and the dark began. She said she had turned a watcher away so the king would not be spectacle. She said the next time she came, she wanted to hear his voice, not only his breath. She waited. From the shadow, a hand emerged — broad, silver-furred, palm up — and closed around the stone heart. Then it drew back into the dark.